Move Fast and Break Things

Uh, Maybe Not

Aldine Press logo.

Mark Zuckerberg adopted the phrase above during the early days of Facebook, and the idea now seems to be part of Silicon Valley's DNA. Elon Musk's DOGE venture, or his Mission to Mars, or pretty much anything he does, including trying to populate the world with little Elons, all resonate with impulsive recklessness. 

I greatly prefer a much older epigram: Make haste slowly. It was a favorite saying of the very first Roman emperor, Augustus (r. 27 BC - 14 AD). I've traced the idea as far back as Plato, who, in his Republic (7:528d), drops the following comment: "... for in my haste to be done I was making less speed." 

The Latin phrase is festina lente. I originally associated it with the Roman orator and teacher of rhetoric Quintilian (ca. 35 AD - ca. 100 AD); it appears he never actually used the phrase, but he did something bigger: he embodied it. 

Over the years I've read a bit of classical rhetoric in translation - Demosthenes and Cicero, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. Quintilian, I knew, was out there, challenging me. He came after the golden age and wrote the big book that summarizes everything. His Institutio Oratoria is five volumes in the Loeb Classical Library, and I'd reconciled myself to the thought that Quintilian was one mountain I would not climb. Then one day I stumbled across a curious little book called Quintilian as Educator (Frederic M. Wheelock, ed., 1974.) The Free Library was kind enough to lend me a copy and also let me hold onto it for quite a while.

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus was a schoolmaster as well as a masterful orator. We don't actually know a whole lot about him. He was born around 35 AD in Hispania, the area now occupied by Spain and Portugal (and Andorra). He went to Rome to pursue his studies, moved back to Hispania to teach rhetoric; moved back to Rome in 68 AD at the behest of Galba, who had been governor in Hispania and who became emperor after Nero committed suicide. Assassins were soon to dispatch Galba (this was the year that Rome had four emperors), and at some point during this chaos Quintilian set up his own school. For about twenty years, under the calming influence of the emperor Vespasian and his successors, he both taught his students and pleaded in the courts, retiring around the year 90; in his retirement he wrote the Institutio Oratoria. He tells us he had a wife and two sons, all of whom died young. We seem to know less about when he died than we do about when he was born, but there is a general feeling that he left us sometime around 100 AD. 

Professor Wheelock's little book performs a very useful task. It extracts the parts of the larger book that deal with childhood education, and we find ourselves looking at a surprisingly modern approach. Quintilian thinks that a child's education begins at birth - "a child's mind should not be allowed to lie fallow for a moment." (I.i.16) 

He sees the child's nurse as the first teacher, and he desires that the nurse should be of good character and speak well. He feels the same way about parents, childhood playmates, and someone called a paedagogus, a member of the household whose job was to follow the child around and keep him out of trouble. (I.i.4-11.) 

Just to back up for a minute, Quintilian was talking about education for children of the upper crust in a country that was largely ruled by an emperor, although relics of the former republic continued to exist. However, I think his discussion is applicable to a democratic society, where we need an education that prepares every child to participate intelligently in government. Today, I think this would include exposure to the variety of the American people - a multiracial, multilingual, and multiclass society. The widespread desire to associate only with people just like you leads to the trap that we are currently in.

Okay. Quintilian also strongly favors bilingual education in Latin and Greek. (I.i.12-14.) Greek was important in ancient Rome because many of the ideas in its intellectual world came written in Greek, and many of the people in the Roman empire spoke Greek as a first language, quite likely including your doctor. Today, I think a bilingual child will have an advantage in a world that is increasingly multilingual. For many years, Americans have assumed that others will learn English. As our status in the world declines, we are going to need to be able to speak to others in their own language. I suggest Spanish, which will be useful both domestically and in much of the rest of the world. 

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Three Epigrams

That brings us to to my search for epigrams. I had originally thought that Quintilian was the source of festina lente, but I soon learned I was wrong. Not only that, but he appears never to have used the phrase. (No, I didn't break down and read all five volumes. I went to the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and searched Quintilian and festina lente. No results.) 

There was another favorite that I had attributed to him: "First we entertain, then we educate." I can't find that one either, but again, the idea permeates his teaching. 

Here's one that was new to me, and that he actually wrote: "... write quickly and you will never write well, write well and you will soon write quickly." (X.iii.10.)  

Quintilian's Afterlife

The Institutio Oratoria was clearly well received in its time and in the following centuries. Professor Wheelock notes that "Quintilian appears as one of St. Jerome's favorite pagan authors" (p. 18). St. Jerome, who died in 420 AD, is best known for translating the Bible into Latin. 

As the Roman world entered the early middle ages, sometimes called the dark ages, mentions of Quintilian (and a lot of other things) declined. That doesn't necessarily mean that he was forgotten. In the ninth century a monk and well-known scholar named Lupus Servatus (the wolf that was saved) "wrote to the Pope asking for a copy of the full twelve books of the Institutio Oratoria, saying that he had only incomplete copies of the work" (p. 18). 

The Lupus Servatus story leads me to guess that a lot of people were doing what Professor Wheelock did - excerpting from a very long book the parts they found most interesting. My further guess is that interest in Quintilian, however fractured, continued through the middle ages and into the renaissance, when something wonderful happened in 1416: A manuscript hunter and official of the papal court named Poggio Bracciolini found a complete copy of the Institutio Oratoria in the monastery of St. Gall in what is now Switzerland. (During his time at St. Gall he also found a copy of the De Architectura by Vitruvius.) 

And so we come to the age of the modern printed book and particularly the Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius, whose logo appears at the beginning of this story. The dolphin winding around the anchor is a visual representation of the classical epigram "Make haste slowly," or festina lente. The dolphin is the rabbit, and the anchor is the turtle. 

It was a time of new beginnings, and Aldus was one of the prime innovators in his field. And yet he was also a stickler for detail, proofreading himself and even bringing Desiderius Erasmus into the printshop in what has been described as "a now almost incredible mixture of the sweatshop, the boarding-house and the research institute.” 

So, an innovator with a great logo (apparently adapted from an old Roman coin) who had the patience to be thorough with the boring bits. I think I'll take him over Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk any day. 

Convention Hall, Asbury Park, 1928-1930.

During my research I stumbled across an interesting law review article; it suggests that today's law schools might benefit from incorporating a number of Quintilian's ideas into their curriculum. To see it, click here.

See also Sandy's Book.